Local Forms of Spatial Analysis

Local forms of spatial analysis focus on exceptions to the general trends represented by more traditional global forms of spatial analysis. There is currently a rapid expansion in the development of such techniques but their history almost exactly parallels that of Geographical Analysis, with the first examples of local analysis appearing in the late 1960s. Indeed, Geographical Analysis has published many of the signijicant contributions in this field. This paper reviews the development of local forms of spatial analysis and assesses the current situation. Following a discussion on the nature and importance of local analysis, examples are given of local forms of point pattern analysis; local graphical approaches; local measures of spatial dependency; the spatial expansion method; adaptive filtering; multilevel modeling; geographically weighted regression; random coe#cients models; autoregressive models; and local forms of spatial interaction models.